By Chris Battista, Founder of SETPIECE | Field Allocation & Scheduling for Youth Sports
I’ve been coaching competitive girls soccer for nearly 18 years. In that time I’ve seen a lot of things go wrong on game day — missed passes, blown assignments, weather calls at the last minute. Those things are part of the sport. What shouldn’t be part of it is what I watched happen last season.
Three Hours on a Sunday
A club director I know, experienced, organized, well-respected in his league, spent three hours on a Sunday afternoon rebuilding a field schedule from scratch. A single weather closure had cascaded into six reassignments across four fields. Three hours. On a Sunday. With a phone full of texts and a spreadsheet that no longer reflected reality.
That’s not a rare story. It’s the norm. I’ve seen coaches show up at 6 PM to find another team already warming up on their space. I’ve seen parents drive 20 minutes to a practice that moved and nobody remembered to tell them. I’ve been that coach. I’ve been that parent.
And every time it happened, the reaction was the same: apologetic texts, a lot of ‘sorry for the confusion,’ and a promise that it wouldn’t happen again. Until it did.
The Real Problem Has a Name
For a long time I assumed this was a people problem, bad communication, disorganized admins, clubs that needed better processes. But after 18 years of watching it from every angle, I realized the problem is structural.
There is no system built specifically for the relationship between a city that allocates field time and the clubs and coaches that use that time. Cities manage permits in one place. Clubs manage schedules in another. Coaches get notified through text chains and WhatsApp groups. When something changes, and something always changes, there’s no single source of truth. There’s just a phone tree that someone inevitably falls off of.
The tools that exist were built for general scheduling, not for this specific workflow. And that gap is costing coaches practice time, costing directors their Sundays, and costing kids development hours they’ll never get back.
So I Built One
SETPIECE is a field allocation and scheduling platform built specifically for the relationship between cities and clubs. It gives parks departments a real-time view of what’s actually happening on their fields. It gives club administrators a formal process for managing, releasing, and reassigning space. And it gives coaches one place to see exactly where they’re supposed to be — and an immediate notification the second that changes.
No more rebuilding schedules on a Sunday. No more coaches finding out at 5:55 PM that they’ve been moved. No more parents driving to the wrong field.
We’re launching our pilot program in the coming weeks, and we’re looking for sports clubs and city parks departments who want to be first. If that’s you, or if you know someone it describes, we have the solution.
#youthsoccer #sportstech #fieldmanagement #buildinpublic #founder